IPI 2008: Montgomery rejects claim that profits are killing the news

David Montgomery was delighted when a young journalist landed a scoop about a money-laundering local lawyer as he was about to relaunch a newspaper in the Dutch city of Maastricht.

After praising the reporter for his efforts he asked him what he had done about the online version of the story. He replied: "Maybe I'll think about that tomorrow."

Monty, chief executive of the Mecom group that publishes 300 titles in five European countries, used the anecdote to illustrate that even young people who enter journalism are not yet sufficiently net-wise. "The tradition is deep-seated that people work for print alone", he told the International Press Institute world congress here in Belgrade.

He said he "reacted with indignation" to the title of the session, "Are profits killing the news?", because "profits are good for news". He stressed that the continued transmission of news depended on profitable news organisations. Meanwhile, journalists have to adapt to the demands of disseminating content on several platforms, and he repeated that sub-editors are going to disappear, because journalists will originate and put up copy directly. The old newsprint-only business model is no longer sustainable, he said.

He had shown his commitment to journalism by having created five divisional chief executives (in charge of operations in the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Germany and Poland) who were all former editors. "The journalist as manager determines out approach to the business", he said.

In what was a rather one-sided panel, he was joined by Michael Ringier, the chairman of the family-owned Swiss media company, and Vuslat Dogan Sabanci, chief executive of Hürriyet (Liberty), the hugely successful Istanbul newspaper.

There were differences of emphasis among the three, but the message was similar. They rejected the notion that journalism is suffering because of demands from private equity companies and other large shareholders for ever-expanding profit margins.

Though critics - including a number among the delegates - claim that media owners treat newspapers as an investment in a commodity, and therefore imperil news-gathering and news transmission, they argued fiercely against such complaints.

Ringier, pointing to "new realities" - the internet and the publishing of freeshets - said: "Journalists have forgotten to redefine their job description." He sees news as a commodity "like any other" but argues that no-one wants to pay for it any longer. Instead, the only thing that matters is exclusivity, the offering of something that people cannot find anywhere else on the net.

Sabanci was bullish about profit-making too. "We need profits to protect our freedom - whether from governments or advertisers - and to go on improving our quality, to keep up with change," she said. And, like Ringier, she also views news as a commodity.

It was important for newspapers to "surf the internet wave" in order to attract audiences online. Clearly, her paper has managed that already because she then produced some eye-opening statistics: Hürriyet's website has 22m unique visitors a month, 1.2bn page views a month, and 1m subscribers, making it one of the world's top ten media sites. (There's an English version here).

The session's moderator, William Green, the editor of Time Europe, pushed all three hard, arguing that they were in denial because there is a crisis for news due to a lack of resources for journalism. They wouldn't have it. Ringier said witheringly that it was not possible now to finance a journalist's month-long trip to Russia to write half a page, but it was still possible for journalists to produce quality work.

Sabanci turned her fire on the failure of US newspapers to move as swiftly towards the new realities of the digital era, arguing that it was due to their being uncompetitive monopolies. By contrast, competition is "in the genes" of newspaper people in Europe.

Green's line of questioning was taken up by all the questioners from the floor. Perhaps Joan McQueeney Mitric put it best, and most provocatively, by asking: "How much profit is enough profit?"